User:Dr Gangrene/Bourgfried affair
The Bourgfried affair (deemools Buurgfried oder Bourgfried geschriwwen), was a political scandal in Luxembourg, which lasted from 1969 to 1974. Eventually, it led to Madeleine Frieden-Kinnen losing her ministerial post in the government. It is named after a locality on the Upper Sûre Lake.
What happened?
[edit]I actually consisted of two affairs mixed up together: an Affaire de mœurs and an affair over the political honour of a politician.
The whole matter was set in motion, when the Tageblatt published with great fanfare a prominently featured piece on an Affaire de mœurs. A witness had allegedly (with binoculars) seen two naked men, who had engaged in homosexual practices on an isolated lawn on the Upper Sûre Lake, near Bourgfried. One of the two was said to be a religion teacher, the other a minor. Further, it was stated that Mme Kinnen had been seen in the company of the two "in a white bikini". The whole article was written in a tone of false outrage, and was meant to damage one's political enemies.
Madeleine Frieden, since 1967 a minister in the second Werner-Schaus government, subsequently sued the editor of the Tageblatt, Jacques Poos, for libel, as the articles were unsigned.
The court case dragged on for some years. The moral scandal resulted, on appeal, in a conviction of the incriminated religion teacher and a suspended prison sentence of 3 years, and a prohibition on exercising his post as a teacher for 10 years. In the libel case, the court decided in the first instance that the Tageblatt could not prove that Mme Frieden was in fact in Buergfrid, this in part due to a statement by the young man. Subsequently, Jacques Poos pursued a court case against the latter for libel, and he was in July 1972 sentenced to 3 months prison.
The consequence was that Madeleine Frieden in September of that year handed in her resignation, and appealed. reecht huet an an Appell gaangen ass. This case was suspended after a few years, so that it never came to a definitive verdict. During her lifetime, she suffered from a feeling of having been treated unfairly. She practically withdrew from public life.
One of her last wishes was to have a letter read out to the Chamber in February 1999, after her death. In this letter, she insisted on her innocence, and described herself as the victim of a miscarriage of justice. She thanked those who supported her, and forgave those who had brought dishonour on her. By coincidence, the only minister representing the government in the Chamber that day was the foreign minister at the time: Jacques Poos.
Further reading
[edit]- Yolande Kieffer: "Un monde misogyne et cruel". in: Lëtzebuerger Almanach vum Joerhonnert, Lëtzebuerg 1999, S.449-456.